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June 8, 2012

With 24 days remaining until election day, Mexico’s National Action Party (PAN) has been unable to manage its public relations faux pas with former President Vicente Fox (2000-2006). Over the weekend, Fox said the nation will need to unite behind the winner on July 1—referring to Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who maintains an 18-point lead over his three rivals.

Days later, at a speech before the Monterey Chapter of the Harvard Club, Fox repeated his claim that Peña Nieto is above in the polls and likely to become Mexico’s next president. While Fox maintains his allegiance and affection to the PAN, he said his comments are a reflection of his party’s inability to do its homework in the past six years.

Fox’s comments angered both his party’s leadership and leftist presidential contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The former said Fox´s comments are insulting and ungrateful to the party that helped him become president. The latter dismissed Fox as “riff-raff” and attributed his comments to a fear that AMLO is only four polling points from the PRI frontrunner. (The figure has been questioned by pollsters, experts and other seasoned campaign consultants since the statement was made earlier this week.)

This is not the first time the former president has spoken positively of the PRI, the PAN’s lifelong nemesis. In April, Fox told reporters the PAN’s nominee, Josefina Vazquez Mota, needs a “small miracle” to win the presidency. Outcry from panistas ended when Vázquez Mota and Fox met to discuss campaign strategy and later posed for pictures with the media.

Vazquez Mota and Fox have a long history: she served as his social development minister for all six years of the Fox administration, a job she executed with high integrity and total devotion. Vázquez Mota worked 18-hour days to reverse the ministry’s traditional politico-electoral operation to support pockets needed to win local, state and national elections. She carried out a census to truly determine how many poor lived in Mexico and brought monitoring and evaluation metrics to the ministry. The relationship, however, was not always friendly due in large part to the First Lady Marta Sahagún and her interference with Vázquez Mota’s decision-making; the first lady wanted the ministry to promote her political agenda as a preamble to her running for president in 2006.

PAN President Gustavo Madero says the party will have to consider sanctioning Fox. But such a move could further wound the party. Former PAN Party President Manuel Espino (2005-2007) was both sanctioned and expelled from the party in 2010 after criticizing President Felipe Calderón both publicly and through two published books. Three weeks ago, Espino, a lifelong panista from Durango, held a large gathering alongside Peña Nieto to announce his support for the PRI in next month’s elections. In Mexico, expelling one´s once loyal party leaders comes at a high cost.

Should the PRI win the presidency in July, the PAN will have a leadership vacuum among its most senior ranks. If defeated, Vázquez Mota seems unlikely lead the party; Calderón’s appointees will have no moral or political fuel left to reconstruct the party; and the party’s current leadership will lack the clout necessary to carry out any significant changes.

Thus, it may be up to individuals like President Fox and a handful of state governors to set new standards and lead the PAN. While Fox’s comments are unfortunate, the party may have to think long-term before making any rash decisions about one of its most respected leaders.

Juan Manuel Henao is a guest blogger to AQ Online. He is a consultant based in Mexico City and former Mexico Country Director for the International Republican Institute (IRI), a Washington DC-based not-for-profit democracy promotion organization.

January 13, 2012

On July 1, Mexicans will choose their president for the next six years. This will be the fourth time the electoral process is not organized by the government but by a supposedly non-biased institution, the Instituto Federal Electoral or IFE.

Mexico likes to boast (especially since 2000) that we hold free, fair and transparent elections. And while that may be the case to some extent, the country could learn a lot from its Latin American neighbors with regard to the process in itself. More than ever, Mexico would benefit from the implementation of a two-round runoff election as opposed to its current majority rule system.

Prior to 1994, general elections were but a façade to legitimize the perpetuation in power of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Without an independent regulatory body to observe the process, elections results were heavily and systematically manipulated, voting booths with opposition preference were ransacked and official tallies always placed the PRI as an absolute majority winner. Under these circumstances, the official rules of the process were irrelevant and a second round of elections would have never made sense as the PRI would always get over 50 percent of the supposed electorate preference.

August 11, 2010

Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president from 2000 to 2006, recently announced his support for the legalization of marijuana and criticized the use of the Mexican Army to support local police forces as they attempt to clamp down on drug cartels in the country. President Fox’s views on drugs and Mexico’s continuing war on drugs were posted on his personal blog.

His comments come just days after President Felipe Calderón hosted a security conference at Los Pinos, the presidential residence, in which Calderón indicated that he did not support legalization but understood that such a move would “significantly reduce criminals’ cash flow.” Fox echoed those remarks by noting that legalization was “a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits.”

The former president’s comments add to the growing number of voices in Latin America calling for a change of strategy in dealing with the scourge of the drug trade. Last year, three former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico endorsed a change in the approach currently taken to stemming the flow of drugs.

President Calderón supports continued debate on legalization, but is personally against such legislation.

February 17, 2010

As headlines continue to report a tale of horror, violence and massacre in what had seemed to be a peaceful country, a growing debate stirs on whether or not Mexico’s government stands a chance to win the war on drugs.

The general consensus is that President Felipe Calderón has inherited a cancer that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional(PRI regime) had contained through institutionalization of corruption. This is a cancer that former President Vicente Fox was unable to effectively cope with when he took office, ending the PRI’s hold on power.Now Felipe Calderón is trying to get rid of this disease by beating it with a big stick and empowering the military to crack down on criminal organizations such as the Zetas and Beltrán Leyva’s group , but as Ana María Salazar has stated recently, “Mexicans are paying a huge price”

Calderón’s war on drugs seems limited if the goal is to effectively address the complex issue of drug-related violence. A recent conversation I had with a group of Thunderbird School of Global Managementand Tec de Monterrey postgraduate students proves there are at least seven more ideas that the President should consider incorporating into his strategy:

1. A hard line political and militarily line is needed, but we should recognize this is not the path to a solution. This part of the strategy should be seen as mere containment.Just like the Planarian worms if you try to cut the head off a criminal organization, it will grow back and sometimes even multiply , but you need to keep doing so to prevent the worm from growing stronger.